Only Kind of “Affirmative Action” at Issue is Racial Discrimination
We must begin by defining what we mean by “affirmative action,” since it includes a variety of policies. Many of these policies are not controversial, as a matter of law or policy. For instance, the term originally meant taking positive steps, proactive measures--affirmative action, get it?--to end discrimination. No one opposes that today. It can also mean “casting a wide net”--that is, recruiting far and wide to make sure that you are hiring the best qualified person possible. That’s fine, too.
But if race or ethnicity is considered as a factor in making an admissions, hiring or promotion, or contracting decision, then we have to acknowledge that discrimination is taking place. We can’t dodge this fact by saying that rigid quotas aren’t being used, or that all those selected meet some minimum set of qualifications, or that race is just one factor, or that alumni or athletes are also given preferences. Finally, we must acknowledge that the degree of preference given is often huge; race is not just a tiebreaker.
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Would you support a racist policy if it "worked"?
This is nothing more than favoring someone based on race, a strange way for making up inequality based on the same premise. Two wrongs don't make a right, and never will.
Minority preference is the meagerness recompense for centuries of unrelieved oppression. In America, many marginally competent or flatly incompetent whites gain employment every day, some because their white skin suits the conscious or unconscious racial preference of their employers. Worse, white incompetence is always an individual matter, but for blacks it is often confirmation of ugly stereotypes. Given that unfairness cuts both ways, does it not only balance the scales of history, does this repay, in a small way, the systematic denial under which African-American ancestors lived out their days?
In theory, affirmative action certainly has all the moral symmetry that fairness requires. It is reformist and corrective, even repentant and redemptive.
The idea that affirmative action violates the rights of white citizens confuses a right with an expectation. We all have a right to be “seriously and fairly considered” for a job or a position. In the past, blacks were not even considered for a job had their rights violated; in the present, whites are seriously and fairly considered, yet still not selected. However, their rights are not violated, but rather had their expectations frustrated. If affirmative action disappears from the American scene, many blacks will continue to excel and succeed. However, that will be “the signal” that would prove to be lethal for our country. That is, white supremacy now has one less constraint and black people have one more reason to lose trust in the promise of American democracy .
"We all have a right to be “seriously and fairly considered” for a job or a position."
No, no you don't. If i don't want to hire you, because i don't like your hair, skin color, breath, resume, height, weight, age, sex, location, sexual preference, or accent I should not have to. Because then I have lost rights to my personal property of business. If you don't want to buy things from me because I have those policies then you don't have to. You are not entitled to a job, that is an idea born out of FDR's stupid "second bill of rights".